Miesiąc: Kwiecień 2018

At first I wanted to write how many hours I spend on web development every week. Then I thought about posting weekly updates. In the end I decided to write a few posts about the whole course experience.

I’m currently at lecture 147 out of 360.

I’ve done some TreeHouse course about front-end development in the past and I find this course better structured and the pace faster. The course begins with clearly laid out and explained syllabus, boldly exclaiming that there will be no PHP involved in this course 😉 I liked how the author compares HTML to the nouns, CSS to the adjectives and JavaScript to the verbs of the web development. In other words, HTML is there for the structure, CSS for the looks, JavaScript for any manipulation and interaction with the website.

What I found is that exercises are great here. At the beginning of the course it usually follows a pattern: introduction to a new concept, a task, a video solution. Later on there are many more code along tasks to do and some code snippets thrown at you to deduct what happens in them. You have to become a little more creative and do more than just follow the videos to learn the material and put some additional practice. I like to redo what the teacher does after the lecture is finished, referring to it only if I must. Sometimes I will add some changes of my own or make up an exercise for myself. The course asks you sometimes to research on your own. Makes a heavy use of Google Chrome’s Dev Tools and the teacher himself in the solutions shows you how you can use stackoverflow and Google to your advantage. This course is made in a way, as if the teacher wants to make sure you become a web developer someday.

At some point, about lecture 75, I got stuck at Bootstrap going into procrastination mode. I found it very challenging for some reason at that point. Not that it necessarily is challenging, just my impression about it made me stuck for about 10 days without making any progress and not wanting to go back to the course materials.

What I’ve came to understand: it’s much easier to write something well from the beginning than have to fix it later.

It seems the course will take me more time than I would expect at first. Not that it’s bad. I know that I’m learning. You can find all that I’ve done so far on my GitHub repository, folder called part 2. Covering HTML, CSS, Bootstrap and some basicJavaScript.

This will be a series about a very popular The Web Developer Bootcamp course on Udemy that I’m going through right now. This is a long course (360 parts, about 95% of them videos) covering basics of web development both front-end and back-end including the following:

HTML

CSS

Bootstrap

JavaScript

DOM

jQuery

NodeJS

Express

MongoDB

RESTful API

The course instructor is a person who normally teaches at bootcamps. The course is constantly maintained. By being maintained I mean that they even upload separate videos to YouTube where you can see the same things done with new technologies. E.g. there is a project using Bootstrap 3, current standard is Bootstrap 4. One of the Teaching Assistants makes a video about the changes from Bootstrap 3 to 4 according to the project from the course.

One of the reasons why I decided to stick with this course is how well balanced it is, rich with exercises and how good the teacher’s explanations are. I don’t believe that it’s „The only course you need to learn web development” like it says on the course’s page. Although, after going through one third of the course I can definitely say that it’s great for a start. Great for going from the point where I barely know anything to the point where I can seriously think about creating websites from scratch instead of using some WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors.

I found another bootcamp-like course, The Odin Project, discouraging because it felt like jumping straight into a deep water without being prepared enough for that. That said, I think it’s great as a follow-up and I might as well go into it deeper after I’m done with The Web Developer Bootcamp. On the other hand I feel that I prefer learning with a human being talking to me, that having to go through written instructions on freeCodeCamp. What’s worth noting, there is also a good follow-up for the Udemy’s course by the same teacher called The Advanced Web Developer Bootcamp.

I watch videos online usually with the speed of x1.5 or x2 when possible, sometimes skipping through the video if the content is already understood by me. I use a laptop connected to a 23 inch monitor. I definitely recommend getting an additional screen for web development. It is so much more convenient! After trying Sublime Text 3, Visual Studio Code and Atom, I decided to go with Atom. I saw it being used in my work and found the preview plugin very convenient. That means I can see how the website looks while staying in Atom. No need to open a browser and refresh a page. I use Ubuntu 16.04 for web development, having Windows 7 installed next to it.

You can see the projects I do following the course at my GitHub repository. GitHub is a web-based hosting for version control using git. What it means, is that I can upload and store my code online, update it, and even revert the changes I’ve made using GitHub. I used the GitHub section of The Odin Project course to learn how to use it.

In the next parts I’ll go into the course materials and hopefully finish it 🙂

Did you ever realize that it takes some courage to start writing a public blog? That it can be a great experience and a lot of fun? That you might feel you are terrible at writing? I sure didn’t until I started to write this first post. My name is Tom and I’m at the beginning of my journey into web development.

This is one of the many beginnings. I’ve tried many times to break into programming career with little success. I lacked motivation, consistency or maybe a blog? Whatever was the case, I didn’t manage to reach my goal. I believe this time is different, since both my circumstances and reasons for doing it are different. I hope that writing a blog will help me to reach my goal, which is to eventually land a job as a web developer.

Here I will document my thoughts, reflections and most important: my progress. I will document my firsthand experience using some often recommended courses: The Web Developer Bootcamp, The Odin Project, freeCodeCamp and doing my own projects. At the time of writing this post I’m already at 125 video out of 359(!) of The Web Developer Bootcamp and went through few modules of The Odin Project, including Git lessons. This means everything I make I will be able to share with you through GitHub.

My main inspiration for starting this blog is through hearing social figures like Gary Vaynerchuk, or John Sonmez from SimpleProgrammer recommend it over and over again. On top of that reading about success stories how becoming more visible on the web can greatly help with career (and possibly not only) were convincing enough. And hey, it’s fun writing on a blog about what I want and however I want! 🙂